ROBBY SOAVE: As Another Accusation Bites the Dust, Columbia Rape Saga Takes New Turn.

Now, I have learned that after a hearing in late April, Nungesser was found “not responsible” in this latest case—altogether, the fourth time he has been cleared of a sexual assault charge at Columbia. When Sulkowicz first went public a year ago, the fact that her alleged attacker was still on campus and had never been subjected to any formal sanctions despite being accused of sexual assault by three different women helped fuel the outrage. Yet the latest investigation strongly supports Nungesser’s claim, made in media interviews and in his lawsuit, that the multiple complaints were not independent of each other and may have been part of a vendetta stemming from the original charge by Sulkowicz.

Perhaps the other false-accusers will get posters of their own.

THE ART OF MANLINESS: 10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action.

I like the references to Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire.

CATHY YOUNG: Feminists want us to define these ugly sexual encounters as rape. Don’t let them. “We need to stop prosecuting bad behavior as rape.”

ED DRISCOLL: Why Does The Left Kowtow To Islam?

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HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS–“CHANGE” IS COMING:  The White House has released “The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate,” a PR/battle plan for President Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.  Obama will use this document as the basis for remarks he will give to the Coast Guard Academy’s commencement.  A summary:

With climate change, certain types of extreme weather events and their impacts, including extreme heat, heavy downpours, floods, and droughts, have become more frequent and/or intense. In addition, warming is causing sea level to rise and glaciers and Arctic sea ice to melt. These and other aspects of climate change are disrupting people’s lives and damaging certain sectors of the economy. The national security implications of climate change impacts are far reaching, as they may exacerbate existing stressors, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and political instability, providing enabling environments for terrorist activity abroad.

Too bad the NOAA report, “Explaining Extremes of 2013 From a Climate Perspective,” debunked this whole climate-change-causes-extreme-weather claim. But again, global warming climate change isn’t really a battle about science; it’s a political wealth redistribution scheme disguised as science.

UPDATE:  House Homeland Security Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-TX) says “Incredibly, the President’s proposed budget allocates more money for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to combat global warming than to counter violent extremism.”

OOPS: Many Probiotics Taken for Celiac Disease Contain Gluten.

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SERIOUSLY, THIS GUY IS BRAIN DEAD:  William Saletan at Slate has perhaps the most idiotic piece on ISIS that I have ever read, the central thesis of which is that ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “sounds like a Republican candidate for president.” His argument:

O Muslims! Do not think the war that we are waging is the Islamic State’s war alone. Rather, it is the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place. … O Muslims everywhere, has the time not come for you to realize the truth of the conflict and that it is between disbelief and faith? … This war is only against you and against your religion.

2. Coexistence is impossible. Is authentic Islam compatible with Western values? Many conservative activists and politicians say it isn’t. This belief suits Baghdadi. He tells Muslims that they must choose:

O Muslims! Whoever thinks that it is within his capacity to conciliate with the Jews, Christians, and other disbelievers, and for them to conciliate with him, such that he coexists with them and they coexist with him while he is upon his religion and upon tawhīd (monotheism), then he has belied the explicit statement of his Lord (the Mighty and Majestic), who says, “And never will the Jews or the Christians approve of you until you follow their religion. … And they will continue to fight you until they turn you back from your religion.”

3. Islam is a religion of war. Santorum, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans say ISIS has a scriptural basis for its violence. Two weeks ago Jeb Bush said “part” of the Muslim world was “not a religion of peace.” Baghdadi, too, rejects the religion-of-peace narrative:

O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war. Your Prophet (peace be upon him) was dispatched with the sword as a mercy to the creation. He was ordered with war until Allah is worshipped alone. He (peace be upon him) said to the polytheists of his people, “I came to you with slaughter.” … He never for a day grew tired of war.

The religion-of-war narrative, whatever its scholarly merits, serves political interests on both sides. It gives the Republicans red meat for the primaries, and it helps Baghdadi persuade Muslims that they’re commanded by God to support ISIS.  . . .

Republicans seem determined to prove Baghdadi right. . . .The convergence of Republican rhetoric with jihadist propaganda isn’t new. It’s been building ever since George W. Bush left the White House. Liberated from presidential responsibility, Republicans degenerated into a party that uses Islam for domestic politics instead of thinking about how their words resonate overseas. That’s how they became backup singers for Osama Bin Laden. Now they’re working for Baghdadi.

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PAUL RAHE: Staging Riots. “Yesterday, Katie Pavlich, Debra Heine, and Ed Driscoll drew our attention to a demonstration, unmentioned in the mainstream media, that took place in St. Louis and eventuated in the occupation of the offices of an outfit called MORE – Missourians for Organizing Reform and Empowerment. MORE is an offshoot of ACORN, and it is funded in part by George Soros’ omnipresent Open Society Institute (which has spent something like $5 billion supporting such outfits in recent years). What makes this particular demonstration newsworthy is the fact that the demonstrators were demanding that they be paid, as promised, for the work they did in organizing demonstrations in Ferguson last summer.”

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FIGHTING ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE WITH A VIRUS: “So, some researchers at Tel Aviv’s Sackler School of Medicine came up with a clever idea: why not create a virus that gives bacteria something that’s useful to them, but gets rid of antibiotic resistance at the same time? Under normal growth circumstances, the bacteria would readily pick up the virus, because it’s useful. But, when faced with an antibiotic assault, they’d be helpless to resist it.”

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IT’S COMING: A PROGRESSIVE UTOPIAN “MASTER PLAN”:  A Wall Street Journal oped reveals how Minneapolis-St.Paul’s 30-year master plan is a liberal/progressive utopian vision:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.” . . .

Thrive MSP 2040 is part of a nationwide movement called “regionalism.” Regional planning of infrastructure is important, of course. But regionalism, as an ideology, is about shifting power away from local elected officials and re-engineering society on behalf of “equity” and “sustainability.” According to regionalist guru David Rusk, author of the book “Cities Without Suburbs,” federal programs that promote regionalism should strive to produce “racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions.” . . .

The council has provided few details, beyond noting that it will emphasize construction of low-income housing in “higher-income areas.” But the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development—the source of the $5 million planning grant used to fund the racial mapping—says that mapping is intended, in part, to identify suburban land-use and zoning practices that allegedly deny opportunity and create “barriers” for low-income and minority people. Under its forthcoming “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, HUD will provide communities with “nationally uniform data” of what it views as an appropriate racial, ethnic and economic mix. Local governments will have to “take meaningful actions” to further the goals identified.

 So basically, the progressive master planners are already planning to change your neighborhood and force it to be just like every other neighborhood.  They want to “spread the wealth around,” not just with taxes, but with housing as well.

 The UC-Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning has developed it’s own master plan for its utopian “NanoCity,” a new city designed around the concepts of “sustainability” (driven by global warming climate change, of course) “equity” and “inclusion.”  Sounds basically like a commune to me, and so long as I’m not forced to live there, I’m happy to let them live as they wish.  The MSP master plan seems more nefarious to me, as it would use government dollars to  “equalize” existing neighborhoods and force changes based on global warming climate change.  People really should get more involved in these local planning exercises.  

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS:  Jim Treacher reports that these posters of Mattress Girl, Emma Sulkowicz, titled “Pretty Little Liar” are cropping up all over NYC, near Columbia University. Good to see someone is punching back.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 741.

I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT WAS MORE, HONESTLY: “A new paper, from Ann Harrison of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues finds that if there had been no imports, median real wages in America in 2008 would have been 3% higher than they actually were. For workers in menial tasks, they would have been 15% higher. Another paper found that a quarter of the employment decline in American manufacturing from 1990 to 2007 was caused by competition from Chinese imports.”

ANNALS OF SMART DIPLOMACY: The Ugly Dilemma in Ramadi.

Following the fall of Ramadi to ISIS this weekend, Iraq is launching a counterattack spearheaded by Shi’a militias that had previously been uninvolved in the fighting. . . .

By all accounts, the Iraqi Army, or ISF, collapsed in the defense of Ramadi, just as it has time and again against ISIS previously, abandoning arms and armor to the enemy as it fled. The Shi’a militias are a more feared fighting force, and they outnumber the ISF by a significant margin. They had been held back, however, because Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, lies in the heart of Sunni Iraq—and the Shi’a militias have been repeatedly, credibly accused of perpetrating sectarian massacres. And there is also the inconvenient fact that many if not most of them have strong links to Iran.
Now the Obama Administration, not to say the Iraqi government, is on the horns of an ugly dilemma. If Ramadi is not recaptured, Sunni Iraq will have slipped to ISIS, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may never be able to put Iraq back together again. On the other hand, if the U.S. backs the militias’ advance, it may well be party to ethnic bloodshed that will put the killings after the fall of Tikrit to pale. Thus, even if the militas do retake Ramadi the methods they employ could so deeply antagonize the non-ISIS-supporting elements of the Sunni population as to have the same result: no more Iraq.

While publicly the Administration and the Pentagon have started to sound a bit like Baghdad Bob, Administration officials have anonymously begun voicing their unease with the situation, in one instance describing Ramadi as a “powder keg” noting that there is a potential for things to go “very, very badly.”

Well, we’ve had lousy leadership since 2009.

THE YOUTH RECESSION: The Economy Is Still Terrible for Young People. “The era of the overeducated barista is here to stay. College graduates are still spending more and more years (and money) to get worse and worse entry-level jobs.” Fundamentally transformed!

Meanwhile, of course, older people suffer from the Obama era’s Senior Squeeze.

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IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Data Faked In Study About Gay Canvassers Changing Minds: A researcher apparently made up the results of the much-publicized study, as revealed Tuesday by scientists trying to replicate it. “Vavreck asked LaCour for the contact information of the survey respondents. He didn’t have it, and apparently confessed that he hadn’t used any of the study’s grant money to conduct any of the surveys.” You can pretty much figure that research that supports The Narrative too neatly has a high chance of being bogus.

HARVARD’S ASIAN PROBLEM:  Jason Riley has an oped in the Wall Street Journal titled “The New Jews of Harvard.”  Harvard is likely on the first of many elite, liberal/progressive universities (redundant, I know) to now find their affirmative action admissions policies biting them in the tuchus.

A coalition of more than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani organizations is asking the U.S. departments of Justice and Education to investigate possible racial bias in undergraduate admissions at Harvard. The complaint announced on Friday, echoing a lawsuit filed by another group in November, accuses Harvard and other elite institutions of holding Asian-Americans to far higher standards than other applicants, a practice used to limit the number of Jewish students at Ivy League schools in the first half of the 20th century. . . .

A 2009 paper by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that “Asian-Americans have the lowest acceptance rate for each SAT test score bracket, having to score on average approximately 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student and 450 points higher than a black student on the SAT to be on equal footing.”

It’s too early to tell whether the Obama administration will take action or wait for the legal process to play out.

I’m pretty sure we know that the Obama Administration won’t be spending its resources to fight for equality for Asian Americans, as it has evinced a single-minded obsession in pursuing only racial matters that affect blacks.

The Asian-American coalition’s lawsuit could be the nail on the coffin for affirmative action, though the Supreme Court may nail it down sooner if it grants review in the new round of litigation in University of Texas v. Fisher.  As Chief Justice Roberts said in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”